Could this be Mr. Trump who said he will win the debate or is this liar, liar pants on fire!

If you are scanning this round the time it’s sent — at close-of-business time Friday, on any occasion weekend — then you’re probably a person who’s savvy enough about political news to learn that individuals are entering prime news dump hours. For any lawmaker, candidate or official trying to bury some inconvenient headline, now will be the last, best moment to accomplish this until Independence Day. Which means that the hours that most Americans are officially transitioning to summer mode are among the most stressful for almost any reporter.

This afternoon — after Bernie Sanders’s campaign capped off two days of tweets and pr announcements and interviews with a statement that he was “prepared to simply accept” either of the network debate proposals for a Trump-Sanders faceoff — the Trump campaign quickly released a statement of their own putting a kibosh in the whole idea: it will be “inappropriate,” said Trump, for a primary season winner to debate one other party’s runner-up.

As some Sanders supporters pause to mourn what may have been, a reminder: every minute anyone, anywhere spent thinking or talking about this debate that has been never planning to happen was a minute they failed to spend thinking or speaking about this week’s Clinton email report. There are occasions when an applicant wants the spotlight to fall on their opponent, and for Donald Trump, the latter half of this week was almost certainly one of those times. The Clinton campaign may owe Team Sanders a fruit basket or something. They could would also like to send anyone to Donald Trump, whose comment yesterday that he’d “love to debate Bernie …it would get extremely high ratings. It should be in a major arena” guaranteed another day of both Sanders pressure and public attention.